Nvidia has started pitching its Vera CPU to Chinese customers. Orders can begin now, and deliveries could start as soon as August, Reuters reported on Friday, citing three people familiar with the talks.
It is a workaround dressed as a product launch. Nvidia's China business has collapsed under US export controls. Jensen Huang said in October that its market share there had fallen to roughly zero. The Vera CPU is a way back in.
Why the Nvidia Vera CPU could slip through
The trick is the chip type. Washington's controls mainly target high-end GPUs, not general-purpose CPUs. Selling a processor is less fraught.
It is not a clean pass, though. It remains unclear whether Nvidia would even need an export licence for an advanced CPU like Vera. The contrast with GPUs is stark: the US licensed about 10 Chinese firms to buy the H200, yet not one has been delivered, with Beijing withholding approval to favour home-grown chips.
Huang has hinted at the opening. Asked in Taipei last month whether Nvidia's CPU forecast included China, he said, “I would think so.”
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A $20bn bet that needs China
Vera is Nvidia's first standalone data-centre CPU, an Arm-based chip built for agentic AI and now in full production. Nvidia says it runs up to 1.8 times faster than rival processors. Anthropic and OpenAI were among its first users.
It is not cheap. A single Vera chip costs “well north” of $20,000 before discounts, and a 256-chip rack runs to about $10m, according to SemiAnalysis. Nvidia expects $20bn in Vera revenue by the end of January. China is too big a market to write off.
The timing helps. The AI race is shifting from training models to running them, and that inference work leans more on CPUs. Demand is so strong that Intel has quoted Chinese buyers six-month waits.
It is also a strike at Intel and AMD
Vera puts Nvidia straight into the CPU market that Intel and AMD have long owned with x86 chips. Selling into China, where server CPUs are scarce, widens that front. The GPU king now wants the processor business too.
Interest, but not adoption
One major Chinese cloud firm plans to order more than 300 servers, two Vera chips each, to test first. For now, Chinese clients plan to run Vera only in their overseas data centres.
Big deployments are not guaranteed. They hinge on software compatibility and the cost of migrating off domestic chips. Beijing is also pushing self-reliance hard. The twist: Alibaba and ByteDance are named as Vera collaborators, even as China builds its own alternatives.
So this is a side door, not the front gate. Nvidia gets a legal route to sell something in China again. Its top GPUs stay blocked, and a grey market fills the gap, with B300 servers going for about $1m inside China. Whether Chinese buyers commit, when they would rather build their own, is the real test of that August deadline.